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Special Topics Course Information for 2017-18, June 29 2017

This course explores both historical and contemporary comics and sequential art in connection with debates surrounding race, class, nation, and sexual and gender diversity. It includes zines, long-form comics, and films. Both popular culture (the new Wonder Woman, Iron Man, Captain America, Green Lantern etc.) and alternative comics (period pieces, political works, and memoirs) will be considered. Topics include: documentary, war, trauma, transgender studies, memory, heroism, capitalism, humour, and satire. Historical and contemporary events will be viewed through the lenses provided by comics themselves and by the burgeoning field of comics criticism. Students may enjoy familiarizing themselves with the library’s extensive resources in the field, starting with:http://library.queensu.ca/search/database/underground-and-independent-comics-comix-and-graphic-novels
PREREQUISITE Level 2 or permission of the DepartmentPlease note: this class is held for second year GNDS plan students until July 19th, 2017. On that date upper year students can register for any remaining seats.

Guided by feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial theoretical frameworks, this course explores impacts of intergenerational trauma in Western contexts, with particular attention to pop cultural representations of trauma memory. In the first couple classes we will look at theoretical writings and excerpts to develop a vocabulary for discussing the concepts of trauma, trauma memory, witness, testimony, and resilience. In subsequent weeks, we will explore the effects of both historic (world events) and quotidian (every day) trauma on individuals and communities through critical assessments of visual art, film, literature, and media, both main stream and social including blogs.
PREREQUISITE Level 3 or permission of the Department

This course will explore the histories of racial capitalism and plantation slavery in relation to black cultural production. Following black studies scholars, the underlying argument is that the history of racial violence provided the conditions for black and other marginalized communities to engender cultural texts and technologies (music, writing, poetry, theory) that critique and challenge different kinds and types of racism. This course will historicize and think about hiphop music and hiphop cultures in relation to longstanding practices of racial violence, focusing specifically on how black and other communities use technology (gramophones, turntables, records, tapes, 808s, LinDrums, voice, song, sampling, auto-tune, MIDI) to creatively tell the history of racial capitalism and subvert white supremacy. These tensions—between racism, technology, music, and resistance—will be explored in relation to location, gender, sexual diversity, and class. Tentative authors for the course are: Alexander Weheliye, Clyde Woods, Mark Campbell, Imani Perry, Tricky, Kendrik Lamar, Rihanna, Zebra Katz, Kanye West, Lil Kim, Missy Elliot, MIA, A Tribe Called Red, and more.
PREREQUISITE Level 3 or above in a GNDS Major or Medial or SXGD Plan, or permission of the DepartmentPlease note: this class is worth 6.0 units but is taught in one term. This course contains an intensive and independent study component.

This course is interested in engaging key problematics, or points of contention, within the transnational study of sexuality. An occasion for intensive study of varied ways that the transnational mobility of people, capital, media, and knowledge systems construct or animate multiple modalities of gender and sexuality, in this course we will consider competing frameworks for understanding sexual and gender identities, practices and politics. Drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives as well as upon artistic, activist and popular media, our work will be organized through intensive study of several case studies, possibly including: transcultural sexualities and genders; racial affects and (settler) homonationalisms; sex work and human trafficking; sexual rights regimes and the “Gay International.”